ACDH Vocabularies

CC-BY 4.0, Sandra Lehecka

A Vocabulary Repository Service

In many areas of scholarly work, controlled vocabularies (gazetteers, thesauri, etc.) play a crucial role as a stable reference for resources and for ensuring interoperability between disparate projects and their data. The ACDH provides a vocabulary repository service that allows for collaborative maintenance and publication of vocabularies and taxonomies of any kind.

The system is based on the open-source software Skosmos, which uses SKOS as the underlying data model. Skosmos offers the possibility to browse vocabularies as well as structured concept displays and the visualisation of concept hierarchies. Vocabularies can be searched with a search interface or by consulting an alphabetical or thematic index and accessed via a REST-API to allow for Linked Data.

ACDH Vocabularies does not only serve controlled vocabularies for ACDH purposes, but is also employed for some of the central services of the CLARIN infrastructure: the CLARIN concept registry and CLAVAS, a repository for specific metadata vocabularies. Additionally ACDH aims to offer ACDH Vocabularies as a service for partners of the national CLARIAH-AT consortium, for the Thesaurus Maintenance working group in DARIAH-EU, and for WP6 - Services and tools in PARTHENOS.